While uncommonly cold weather has been making news this winter, SFU exercise physiologist Miriam Clegg is more concerned about the deadly consequences of long hot summers.

The postdoctoral researcher at SFU’s exercise and environmental physiology laboratory predicts climate change will result in ever more frequent and intense summer heat waves—along with dramatically higher numbers of people dying.

Seniors are particularly vulnerable, she says, because of their frequently impaired thermoregulation or body-temperature control abilities. As a grim harbinger, she points to the 2003 summer heat wave in France that resulted in close to 15,000 deaths, almost all of them seniors.

Clegg is researching the physiological basis of impaired thermoregulation in seniors, which she says is essential to developing counter measures to prevent heat illness in this population.

And she’s looking for healthy male volunteers aged 55–70 to take part in her research, which will investigate cardiovascular and thermoregulatory responses to changes in core temperatures. Information: miriamclegg@hotmail.com